‘In a sentimental mood’: German radicals and the French Revolution in the Rhineland, 1792–1814

This dissertation explores the transmission, reception, and cultural translation of the French Revolution in the German Rhineland during the region\u27s military occupation, civil administration, and eventual annexation by France from 1792/4-1814. By charting the trajectories of some exemplary German radicals\u27 biographies and political careers, the dissertation challenges conventional understandings of the development of German political culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. While previous interpretations frequently stressed German political passivity and aloofness, the thesis demonstrates the active German agency in this process of intellectual and cultural transmission. Specifically, the thesis explains how new appropriations of extant discursive traditions—predominantly sentimentalism (Empfindsamkeit), republicanism, and self—shaped the modes of political expression and social identity formation among a cohort of German pro-revolutionary activists. These new conceptual languages, the thesis argues, emerged as direct consequences of the German radicals\u27 encounter with, embroilment in, and eventual falling away with the French Revolution and its legacy. Moreover, the thesis illustrates both the malleability and the propensity of particular ideas and symbolic practices to become \u27translated\u27 in whole or in part between differing socio-political contexts, and under shifting political climates. Due to the changing objectives informing the French European and global expansion—from the generally eudemonistic cosmopolitanism of the early French Republic to the self-serving etatism of the Napoleonic Empire—the revolutionary legacy became an increasingly ambiguous artifact for the German radicals. Consequently, their formative revolutionary experiences were ones of emotional disillusionment, political persecution, and exile. The thesis shows how these experiences and the conceptual vocabularies they engendered shaped the German radicals\u27 efforts to work through their revolutionary-induced predicament, examining attempts at Franco-German political initiation, the French administrative integration of the Rhineland, cultural and intellectual border crossing, and perceptions of intra-German social conflict. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that these discursive tools gave rise to renewed modes of German sociability and cultural identity, furnishing the conceptual building blocks for German nationalism after 1814